Confessions Of A Gallery Girl Pt. 2: The Evil Collector

What is the downside of selling artwork: A fist fight in an art fair? Going to bed with a married millionaire? This gallery girl has some confessions to make. Every gallery I’ve ever worked for has always been careful with whom they make business with. Whenever some anonymous or obscure rich person e-mails us regarding the fresh young talent […]

Philanthropist Michael Audain reveals design for his Whistler museum

Described by its architect as a “very quiet participant within the forest,” the Audain Art Museum planned for Whistler, B.C., has grown to double the size originally announced. On Tuesday, philanthropist Michael Audain revealed the design for a 55,000-square-foot museum – up from the 27,000 square feet first proposed last fall, and the 39,000-square-foot facility […]

Jerry Saltz on MoMA’s Plan to Raze the Folk Art Museum: Good!

How sad. Just twelve years after it was built on W. 53rd Street next to MoMA, the former American Folk Art Museum is going to be torn down by its new owner: MoMA. What’s sad is not that the building is going; it’s that, despite near-universal rave reviews for its architecture, it was doomed to […]

Collector Anita Zabludowicz on Why She Is “Most Attracted to Innovative Art”

As two of the world’s most prominent collectors of contemporary art, Anita Zabludowicz and her husband,Poju, have amassed enough work over their four decades of collecting to fill not only their homes but also elegantly appointed public exhibition spaces in London and New York. However, the couple stands apart from the majority of the elite collector class […]

Inside 20,000 balloons: Martin Creed’s fun, disorienting Work No. 202

No more envying the kids in the ball room at IKEA. The National Gallery has a new work of contemporary art that’s sort of an adult version of a ball-filled room, with a subtext of deep thinking. The installation is titled Work No. 202: Half the Air in a Given Space, and it’s byMartin Creed, who won Britain’s sometimes-controversial […]

Sarah Thornton – Top 10 reasons NOT to write about the art market

Canadian name-brand art reporter, Sarah Thornton, has pulled a Greg Smith, today, penning a screed for TAR Magazine entitled “Top 10 reasons NOT to write about the art market.” In it, the “Seven Days in the Art World” author concludes that the subject is too corrupt to report on and therefore she will shift away from this kind […]

Painting by Proxy

David Hockney recently touched off a controversywith a poster advertising his new exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts that read: “All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally.” When the BBC journalist Andrew Marr asked Hockney if the statement was a dig at Damien Hirst, who employs up to 100 craftsmen to […]

Lunch with the FT: Jay Jopling

The art dealer talks about his rise from selling fire extinguishers to making household names of Britain’s YBAs. Standing on bohemian, buzzing Bermondsey Street in south London, outside Europe’s biggest commercial art gallery, its owner Jay Jopling gazes through a row of upright, painted steel fins that demarcates the courtyard. “I wanted a low wall, to be […]

Adel Abdessemed: Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf

War, violence, death – these aren’t pretty topics. Nevertheless they’re topics that are explored in Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, an exhibition of artwork by Adel Abdessemed. Despite the dark subject matter of the artwork, people were laughing and having a good time at the opening for the exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery.

Full circle: the endless attraction of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings

The titles of Damien Hirst‘s spot paintings give them a slightly menacing, as well as a dangerously attractive, air: Cocaine Hydrochloride, Morphine Sulphate, Bovine Albumin, Butulinium Toxin A. Their relentless, insistent brightness feels almost bad for you. No wonder one group of paintings is called Controlled Substances. Yet they have no discernable secrets, and that’s part of the deal. […]

Hirst, Globally Dotting His ‘I’

Thanks to the Gagosian art empire, a ludicrous number of paintings by Damien Hirst are on display right now: 331 of Mr. Hirst’s implacably cheerful “spot” abstractions spread among Gagosian’s 11 galleries in 8 cities on 3 continents. The good news, of course, is that they’re not all in one place. And none involve dead animals, maggots, encrusted diamonds […]